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Birth of John Purroy Mitchel, the 95th Mayor of New York City

John Purroy Mitchel, the 95th mayor of New York City (1914-17), is born on July 19, 1879, at Fordham, Bronx, New York City. He is remembered for his short career as leader of reform politics in New York as well as for his early death as a U.S. Army Air Service officer in the last months of World War I.

Mitchel is born to James Mitchel, a New York City fire marshal, and Mary Purroy who works as a schoolteacher until her marriage. His father is Irish, and Presbyterian in faith, the son of the famous Irish nationalist John Mitchel, and a veteran of the Confederate States Army. Two of his uncles were killed fighting for the Confederacy. His maternal grandfather, Venezuelan-born Juan Bautista Purroy, was that country’s consul in New York, which makes Mitchel the first Mayor of New York City of Latino descent. His great-grandfather, José Joaquin de Purroy, was a lawyer from Spain who settled in Venezuela. He graduates from a Catholic secondary school at Fordham Preparatory School in the late 1890s. He obtains his bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in 1899 and graduates from New York Law School in 1902 with honors. He then pursues a career as a private attorney.

In December 1906, Mitchel’s career takes flight when he is hired by family friend and New York City corporation counsel William B. Ellison to investigate the office of John F. Ahearn, borough president of Manhattan, for incompetence, waste and inefficiency. As a result, Ahearn is dismissed as borough president of Manhattan. He begins his career as assistant corporation counsel and then becomes a member of the Commissioners of Accounts, from which he investigates city departments. He gains results and recognition for his thorough and professional investigations into various city departments and high-ranking officials. Along with the help of Henry Bruère and other staff members of the Bureau of Municipal Research, he turns the insignificant Commissioners of Accounts into an administration of importance.

The young Mitchel’s reputation as a reformer garners him the support of the anti-Tammany forces. In 1909, he is elected president of the New York City Board of Aldermen, an organization similar to the current New York City Council. As president of the Board of Aldermen, he is able to enact fiscal reforms. He cuts waste and improves accounting practices. Also, he unsuccessfully fights for a municipal-owned transit system and the city sees him vote against allowing the Interborough Rapid Transit and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit companies permission to extend their existing subway and elevated lines. For a six-week period in 1910 after current Mayor William J. Gaynor is injured by a bullet wound, he serves as acting mayor. His biggest accomplishment during his short tenure is the act of neutrality during a garment industry strike.

As the mayoral election approaches in 1913, the Citizens Municipal Committee of 107 sets out to find a candidate that will give New York “a non-partisan, efficient and progressive government.” They are assisted in this endeavor by the Fusion Executive Committee, led by Joseph M. Price of the City Club of New York. After nine ballots, Mitchel is nominated as a candidate for mayor. During his campaign, he focuses on making City Hall a place of decency and honesty. He also focuses on business as he promises New Yorkers that he will modernize the administrative and financial machinery and the processes of city government.

At the age of 34, Mitchel is elected mayor on the Republican Party slate as he wins an overwhelming victory, defeating Democratic candidate Edward E. McCall by 121,000 votes, thus becoming the second youngest mayor of New York City. He is often referred to as “The Boy Mayor of New York.”

Mitchel’s administration introduces widespread reforms, particularly in the Police Department, which has long been highly corrupt, and which is cleaned up by Mitchel’s Police Commissioner Arthur H. Woods. Woods is able to break up gangs and in his first year in office and he arrests more than 200 criminals. Woods also launches an attack on robbery, prostitution, pickpocketing and gambling. Woods ultimately transforms the police department into a crime-fighting machine. Mitchel aims to get rid of corruption wherever he sees it. His administration sets out to restructure and modernize New York City and its government. He is able to expand the city’s regulatory activities, runs the police department more honestly and efficiently and, much like in 1910, he maintains impartiality during garment and transportation workers strikes in 1916.

At 1:30 p.m. on April 17, 1914, Michael P. Mahoney fires a gun at the mayor as Mitchel is getting in his car to go to lunch. The bullet ricochets off a pedestrian and hits Frank Lyon Polk, New York City’s corporation counsel, in the chin.

Mitchel’s early popularity is soon diminished due to his fiscal policies and vision of education. He is heavily criticized for combining vocational and academic courses. He begins to trim the size of the Board of Education and attempts to control teachers’ salaries.

Mitchel advocates universal military training to prepare for war. In a speech at Princeton University on March 1, 1917, he describes universal military training as “the [only] truly democratic solution to the problem of preparedness on land.” His universal military training alienates New Yorkers and is not popular. Many feel he focuses too much on military patriotism and is indifferent to politics. This soon leads to a loss of support for his re-election bid in 1917.

Mitchel runs again for mayor in the highly charged wartime election of 1917. His re-election bid takes a hit as many New Yorkers feel he is socializing with the social elite, focuses too much on the economy and efficiency and his concern on military preparedness. He narrowly loses the Republican primary to William M. Bennett after a contentious recount but then runs for re-election as a pro-war Fusion candidate.

Mitchel’s main campaign theme is patriotism, with a media campaign that denounces Germans, Irish, and Jews as unpatriotic sympathizers with the enemy cause. He runs against Republican Bennett, antiwar Socialist Morris Hillquit, and the Tammany Hall Democrat John F. Hylan. Hylan ridicules and denounces Mitchel’s upper-class reform as an affront to democracy and to the voters. He wins by a landslide without taking a clear position on the war. Mitchel barely beats Hillquit for second place.

After failing to get re-elected, Mitchel joins the Air Service as a flying cadet, completing training in San Diego and obtaining the rank of major. On the morning of July 6, 1918, when returning from a short military training flight to Gerstner Field, near Lake Charles, Louisiana, his plane suddenly goes into a nosedive, causing him to fall from his plane due to an unfastened seatbelt. He plummets 500 feet to his death, his body landing in a marsh about a half mile south of the field.

Mitchel’s body is returned to Manhattan, New York City. His funeral is held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and he is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City, on July 11, 1918.

Mitchel Field on Long Island is named for him in 1918. A bronze memorial plaque with his likeness is also affixed between the two stone pylons at the western end of Hamilton Hall, the main college building at Columbia University. A plaque of his likeness is on the entrance to the base of the Central Park Reservoir elevated cinder jogging track at 90th Street and Fifth Avenue entrance to Central Park. The New York City Fire Department operates a fireboat named John Purroy Mitchel from 1921 to 1966.


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Death of Francis Browne, Irish Jesuit & Photographer

Francis Patrick Mary Browne, distinguished Irish Jesuit and a prolific photographer, dies in Dublin on July 7, 1960. His best-known photographs are those of the RMS Titanic and its passengers and crew taken shortly before its sinking in 1912. He is decorated as a military chaplain during World War I.

Browne is born to a wealthy family in 1880 at Buxton House, Cork, County Cork, the youngest of the eight children of James and Brigid (née Hegarty) Browne. His mother is the niece of William Hegarty, Lord Mayor of Cork, and a cousin of Sir Daniel Hegarty, the first Lord Mayor of Cork. She dies of puerperal fever eight days after his birth. After the death of his father in a swimming accident at Crosshaven on September 2, 1889, he is raised and supported by his uncle, Robert Browne, Bishop of Cloyne, who buys him his first camera shortly before the younger man embarks on a tour of Europe in 1897.

Browne spends his formative years at Bower Convent, Athlone (1888–91), Belvedere College (1891–92), Christian Brothers College, Cork (1892–1893), St. Vincent’s Castleknock College (1893–97), graduating in 1897. He goes on the aforementioned tour of Europe, where he begins taking photographs.

Upon his return to Ireland, Browne joins the Jesuits and spends two years in the novitiate at St. Stanislaus College, Tullabeg, County Offaly. He attends the Royal University of Ireland, Dublin, where he is a classmate of James Joyce, who features him as Mr. Browne the Jesuit in Finnegans Wake. In 1909, he visits Rome with his uncle and brother, a bishop and priest respectively, during which they have a private audience with Pope Pius X with the Pope allowing Browne to take his photograph. He studies theology at the Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy in Dublin from 1911 to 1916.

In April 1912 Browne receives a present from his uncle: a ticket for the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic from Southampton, England, to Queenstown, Ireland, via Cherbourg, France. He travels to Southampton via Liverpool and London, boarding the RMS Titanic on the afternoon of April 10, 1912. He is booked in cabin A-37 on the Promenade Deck. He takes dozens of photographs of life aboard RMS Titanic on that day and the next morning. He captures the last known images of many crew and passengers, including captain Edward J. Smith, gymnasium manager T. W. McCawley, engineer William Parr, Major Archibald Butt, writer Jacques Futrelle and numerous third-class passengers whose names are unknown.

During his voyage on the RMS Titanic, Browne is befriended by an American millionaire couple who are seated at his table in the liner’s first-class dining saloon. They offer to pay his way to New York and back in return for him spending the voyage to New York in their company. He telegraphs his superior, requesting permission, but the reply is an unambiguous “GET OFF THAT SHIP – PROVINCIAL.”

Browne leaves the RMS Titanic when she docks in Queenstown and returns to Dublin to continue his theological studies. When the news of the ship’s sinking reaches him, he realises that his photos would be of great interest, and he negotiates their sale to various newspapers and news cartels. They appear in publications around the world. The Eastman Kodak Company subsequently gives him free film for life, and he often contributes to The Kodak Magazine. It is unknown what type of camera he used to shoot the famous photos aboard RMS Titanic.

After his ordination on July 31, 1915, Browne completes his theological studies. In 1916, he is sent to Europe to join the Irish Guards as a chaplain. He serves with the Guards until the spring of 1920, including service at the Battle of the Somme and at Locre, Wytschaete, Messines Ridge, Paschendaele, Ypres, Amiens and Arras in Flanders.

Browne is wounded five times during the war, once severely in a gas attack. He is awarded the Military Cross (MC) on June 4, 1917 “for distinguished service in the field”. He is awarded a bar to his MC on February 18, 1918. He is also awarded the Croix de Guerre by France.

Browne takes many photographs during his time in Europe. One, which he calls “Watch on the Rhine,” is considered a classic image of World War I. He assembles a collection of his war photographs in an album named after his most famous photograph and distributes copies to his colleagues in the Guards.

After the war, Browne returns to Dublin, where, in 1922, he is appointed superior of Gardiner Street Church in Dublin. Ill health dogs him, however, and in 1924 it is thought that he would recover more quickly in warmer climes. He is sent on an extended visit to Australia. He takes his camera along, photographing life aboard ship and in Cape Town, South Africa, where he breaks his voyage.

On his way back to Ireland, Browne visits Ceylon, Aden, Suez, Saloniki, Naples, Toulon, Gibraltar, Algeciras, and Lisbon, taking photographs of local life and events at every stop. It is estimated that he takes more than 42,000 photographs during his life.

Browne resumes office as the Superior of Saint Francis Xavier Church, Dublin, upon his return. In 1929 he is appointed to the Retreats and Mission staff of the Irish Jesuits. His work entails preaching at missions and religious retreats all over Ireland. As most of this work is necessarily performed on evenings and Sundays, he has considerable time to indulge in his hobby during the daytime. He takes photographs of many parishes and towns in Ireland, and also photographs in London and East Anglia during his ecclesiastical travels to England.

Browne dies in Dublin on July 7, 1960, and is buried in the Jesuit plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. His negatives lay forgotten for 25 years after his death. They are found by chance in 1985 when Father Edward E. O’Donnell discovers them in a large metal trunk, once belonging to Browne, in the Irish Jesuit archives. “When the trunk was opened in 1985, people compared him to the greats like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, but his work predated theirs by decades,” archivist David Davison later recalls.

O’Donnell brings the negatives to the attention of several publishers. The RMS Titanic photographs are published in 1997 as Father Browne’s Titanic Album with text by E. E. O’Donnell (Fr. Eddie O’Donnell). In all, at least 25 volumes of Browne’s photographs have now been published. The features editor of The Sunday Times of London calls this “the photographic equivalent to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Many of these books have become best-sellers, the latest being the Centenary Edition of Father Browne’s Titanic Album in 2012 by Messenger Publications, Dublin.

The Irish province of the Jesuits, the owner of the negatives pursuant to Browne’s will, engage photographic restoration specialists David and Edwin Davison to preserve and catalogue the fragile and unstable negatives. The Davisons make copies of every negative and are in the process of transferring every usable image to a digital format for future generations. The Davisons later acquire the rights to the photographs and still own the rights as Davison & Associates.


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Bridie Gallagher’s “The Boys From The County Armagh” Tops the Irish Charts

Bridget “Bridie” Gallagher, Irish singer affectionately known as “The Girl from Donegal,” reaches No. 1 in the Irish Singles Chart with “The Boys From The County Armagh” on July 2, 1957. She is widely regarded as “Ireland’s first international pop star.”

Gallagher is born on September 7, 1924 in Creeslough, County Donegal. She starts her singing in the Creeslough Hall with a local Céilí band started by Bill Gallagher. The Creeslough Hall is owned by Jim McCaffrey and Bridie makes many more visits to the Creeslough Hall in her home town throughout her long and successful career. Her talent is soon spotted in the 1950s by Billy Livingstone who is a talent scout for Decca Records. She goes to Belfast, which becomes her base, where she marries Robert (Bob) Livingstone (no relation to Billy Livingstone) and has two boys, Jim and Peter. Peter dies in a motor accident in 1976 and Jim later goes on to tour with her.

Gallagher shoots to fame in 1956 with her recording of “A Mother’s Love’s A Blessing” and achieves international acclaim with her legendary rendition of “The Boys From County Armagh.” During her career, which spans over six decades, she appears in many leading venues across the globe. She also makes songs such as “The Homes of Donegal” famous.

Gallagher holds the record for the largest number of people in attendance in the Royal Albert Hall in London, with over 7,500 people, a record that is never equaled as it goes on to become an all-seater venue. She becomes world-famous and travels all over the world, United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and is known as “The Girl from Donegal.” She plays in many of the world’s best known theatres, including London’s Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall in New York City. She sings mainly ballads or as they later became known as Country and Irish. One of her best known songs is “The Boys From The County Armagh,” which sells over 250,000 copies, the biggest-selling Irish single at that time.

Bridie also records “Cottage by the Lee,” written by Irish songwriter, Dick Farrelly. Farrelly achieved worldwide fame with his classic song “The Isle of Innisfree“, which is originally a worldwide hit for Bing Crosby and is chosen by movie director John Ford as the main theme music for his film The Quiet Man.

Gallagher lives in Belfast for most of her life. She is honoured by the people of Creeslough on July 10, 2000 with an event to celebrate her career. Members of her family from Creeslough and Donegal attend the event along with her two sisters and their families who travel from Glasgow to be there along with an estimated crowd of 2,500 fans. A plaque paying tribute to her is unveiled. The following day she is honoured by Donegal County Council when they hold a Civic Reception for her. “Bridie blazed the trail for many artists who followed after her and I’m sure that many of them looked upon her as a role model as they started their careers in the music world,” council chairman Charlie Bennett says at the ceremony.

Gallagher dies at her home in Belfast on January 9, 2012 at the age of 87. Her burial takes place in her native Creeslough.


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Death of Jeanne Rynhart, Sculptor & Creator of the Molly Malone Statue

Jeanne Patricia Rynhart (née Scuffil), Irish sculptor and creator of the Molly Malone statue, dies in Cork, County Cork, on June 9, 2020.

Rynhart is born Jeanne Scuffil in Dublin on March 17, 1946, to Kathleen Connolly and Frederick Scuffil, a sign writer for the Guinness Brewery. She is an apprentice to George Collie RHA for two years and then attends the National College of Art and Design, graduating in 1969 before moving to Coventry, England, where she continues her studies in fine art and sets up a studio with sculptor John Letts. She returns to Ireland in 1981, moving to Ballylickey, near Bantry in County Cork, where she establishes the Rynhart Fine Art gallery and workshop with her husband, Derek.

One of the first bronze craft studios in Ireland, the Rynhart pieces include both small figurative cold cast bronze sculptures of flower sellers, fishermen, horses, sailing boats and musical instruments as well as bronze life-size statues, smelted in a foundry. Her busts of Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift are in the Dublin Writers Museum and a Rynhart bust of James Joyce is in New York Public Library.

Rynhart creates the Molly Malone statue for the 1988 Dublin Millennium celebrations. The statue is controversial at the time of its unveiling due to the statue’s revealing dress. Registrar of Aosdána, Adrian Munnelly, writes to the An Bord Fáilte criticising it. The statue is defended by the Lord Mayor of Dublin Ben Briscoe. Rynhart herself writes in The Irish Times that the clothing and appearance are accurate for women of that era. The statue has since become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Dublin and is fondly regarded by locals.

Rynhart also sculpts a statue commemorating the original Rose of Tralee, Mary O’Connor, which stands in Tralee Town Park. In 1993, she produces two statues in honour of Annie Moore, the first passenger processed through the Ellis Island immigration station on January 1, 1892. The statues are located at the Cobh Heritage Centre in Cork and Ellis Island in New York City. The Ellis Island statue is dedicated by the then-President of Ireland, Mary Robinson.

In 1994, Rynhart’s daughter Audrey joins the business. In 2010, Audrey and her husband, Les Elliott, take over the running of the business which is now based in their studio in Glengarriff, County Cork. From then onwards, Rynhart continues to do some modelling work but has largely retired.

Rynhart dies on June 9, 2020, aged 74, in Schull Community Hospital, Cork, following a short illness. She is buried in the Abbey Cemetery, Bantry, and is survived by her husband, Derek, daughter, Audrey, son, Barry, and grandchildren, Lydia and Sophie.


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Birth of Muriel Frances Murphy MacSwiney

Muriel Frances Murphy MacSwiney, Irish nationalist and left-wing activist, and the first woman to be given the Freedom of New York City, is born Muriel Frances Murphy into a wealthy family on June 8, 1892, in Cork, County Cork. She is the wife of Terence MacSwiney, mother of Máire MacSwiney Brugha and sister-in-law of Mary MacSwiney.

Murphy’s father is Nicholas Murphy and her mother Mary Gertrude Purcell of Carrigmore, in Montenotte, Cork. She is sent away to school, to a convent in Sussex, England.

At Christmas 1915 Murphy attends an evening at the Fleischmann home where she meets Terence MacSwiney. Her family does not want the couple involved and does not approve of her growing interest in nationalism and socialism. In 1917 she marries MacSwiney in St. Joseph’s Church, Bromyard, Herefordshire, while he is interned due to his involvement in the Easter Rising of 1916. Her bridesmaid is Geraldine O’Sullivan, and his best man is Richard Mulcahy. The couple had waited until she had come of age at 25 so that she is financially independent of her parents. They have a daughter, Máire MacSwiney Brugha.

MacSwiney sees very little of her husband during their married life as he is often arrested. He dies due to his hunger strike on October 25, 1920, as Lord Mayor of Cork. Her husband’s death has a huge impact on her life, being a public event as well as a personal loss. She completes a lecture and interview tour of the United States, over nine months, with his sister Mary. She is the first woman to be given the Freedom of New York City, in 1922.

MacSwiney is part of a group posing as a Red Cross delegation who breaks Annie M. P. Smithson out of Mullingar prison with the help of Linda Kearns MacWhinney.

MacSwiney begins to suffer from depression and takes her daughter to Germany, leaving her there while she travels Europe. She eventually loses custody of her child and by 1934 she no longer has any involvement in her daughter’s life.

MacSwiney spends a lot of time in Paris, where she continues to be engaged with politics, typically those of left-wing, including communist, groups. She becomes involved with Pierre Kaan and they have a daughter, Alix, who is born on May 5, 1926, in Germany. Kaan is sent to a concentration camp by the Gestapo and dies on May 18, 1945, as a result of his treatment there.

MacSwiney is critical of American foreign policy on Vietnam, calling the United States a “world imperialist power.”

MacSwiney never resolves her relationships with either her own daughter or her family. She is paid a pension as the widow of Terence MacSwiney from 1950. She is living in Tonbridge in Kent with her daughter near the end of her life. She dies on October 26, 1982, at Oakwood Hospital in Barming Heath near Maidstone.


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Birth of Thomas Addis Emmet, Lawyer, Politician & Revolutionary

Thomas Addis Emmet, Irish and American lawyer and politician, is born in the Hammond’s Marsh area of Cork, County Cork, on April 24, 1764. He is a senior member of the revolutionary republican group Society of United Irishmen in the 1790s and Attorney General of New York 1812–1813.

Emmet is a son of Dr. Robert Emmet from County Tipperary (later to become State Physician of Ireland) and Elizabeth Mason of County Kerry, both of whose portraits are today displayed at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery. He is the elder brother of Robert Emmet, who is executed for leading the Irish Rebellion of 1803, becoming one of Ireland’s most famous republican martyrs. His sister, Mary Anne Holmes, holds similar political beliefs.

Emmet is educated at Trinity College, Dublin and is a member of the committee of the College Historical Society. He later studies medicine at the University of Edinburgh and is a pupil of Dugald Stewart in philosophy. After visiting the chief medical schools on the continent, he returns to Ireland in 1788. However, the sudden death of his elder brother, Christopher Temple Emmet (1761–1788), a student of great distinction, induces him to follow the advice of Sir James Mackintosh to forsake medicine for the law as a profession.

Emmet is a man of liberal political sympathies and becomes involved with a campaign to extend the democratic franchise for the Irish Parliament and to end discrimination against Catholics. He is called to the Irish bar in 1790 and quickly obtains a practice, principally as counsel for prisoners charged with political offenses. He also becomes the legal adviser of the Society of the United Irishmen.

When the Dublin Corporation issues a declaration of support of the Protestant Ascendancy in 1792, the response of the United Irishmen is their nonsectarian manifesto which is largely drawn up by Emmet. In 1795 he formally takes the oath of the United Irishmen, becoming secretary in the same year and a member of the executive in 1797. As by this time the United Irishmen had been declared illegal and driven underground, any efforts at peaceful reform of government and Catholic emancipation in Ireland are abandoned as futile, and their goal is now the creation of a non-sectarian Irish republic, independent from Britain and to be achieved by armed rebellion. Although Emmet supports this policy, he believes that the rebellion should not commence until French aid has arrived, differing from more radical members such as Lord Edward FitzGerald.

British intelligence infiltrates the United Irishmen and manages to arrest most of their leaders on the eve of the rebellion. Though not among those taken at the house of Oliver Bond on March 12, 1798, Emmet is arrested about the same time and is one of the leaders imprisoned initially at Kilmainham Gaol and later in Scotland at Fort George until 1802. Upon his release he goes to Brussels where he is visited by his brother Robert in October 1802 and is informed of the preparations for a fresh rising in Ireland in conjunction with French aid. However, at that stage France and Britain are briefly at peace, and the Emmets’ pleas for help are turned down by Napoleon.

Emmet receives news of the failure of his brother’s rising in July 1803 in Paris, where he is in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte. He then emigrates to the United States and joins the New York bar where he obtains a lucrative practice.

After the death of Matthias B. Hildreth, Emmet is appointed New York State Attorney General in August 1812 but is removed from office in February 1813 when the opposing Federalist Party obtains a majority in the Council of Appointment.

Emmet’s abilities and successes become so acclaimed, and his services so requested that he becomes one of the most respected attorneys in the nation, with United States Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story declaring him to be “the favourite counsellor of New York.” He argues the case for Aaron Ogden in the landmark United States Supreme Court case of Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824) relating to the Commerce and Supremacy clauses of the United States Constitution.

Emmet dies on November 14, 1827, while conducting a case in court regarding the estate of Robert Richard Randall, the founder of Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a home for needy seamen in Staten Island, New York. He is buried in St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery churchyard in the East Village, New York City, where a large white marble monument marks his grave.


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John Mitchel Re-elected to Parliament; Dies Eight Days Later

After being barred as an undischarged felon from taking his seat as elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Tipperary, John Mitchel, Irish nationalist activist, author, and political journalist, is re-elected on March 12, 1875. He dies eight days later.

Mitchel is born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Derry on November 3, 1815, the son of a Presbyterian minister. At the age of four, he is sent to a classical school, run by an old minister named Moor, nicknamed “Gospel Moor” by the students. He reads books from a very early age. When a little over five years old, he is introduced to Latin grammar by his teacher and makes quick progress. In 1830, not yet 15 years old, he enters Trinity College, Dublin and obtains a law degree in 1834. In the spring of 1836 he meets Jane Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner. Though both families are opposed to the relationship, they become engaged in the autumn and are married on February 3, 1837, by the Rev. David Babington in Drumcree Church, the parish church of Drumcree.

Mitchel works in a law office in Banbridge, County Down, where he eventually comes into conflict with the local Orange Order. He meets Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy during visits to Dublin. He joins the Young Ireland movement and begins to write for The Nation. Deeply affected by the misery and death caused by the Great Famine, he becomes convinced that nothing will ever come of the constitutional efforts to gain Irish freedom. He then forms his own paper, United Irishmen, to advocate passive resistance by Ireland’s starving masses.

In May 1848, the British tire of Mitchel’s open defiance. Ever the legal innovators in Ireland, they invent a crime especially for the Young Irelanders – felony-treason. They arrest him for violating this new law and close down his paper. A rigged jury convicts him, and he is deported first to Bermuda and then to Australia. However, in June 1853, he escapes to the United States.

Mitchel works as a journalist in New York City and then moves to the South. When the American Civil War erupts, he is a strong supporter of the Southern cause, seeing parallels with the position of the Irish. His family fully backs his commitment to the Southern cause. He loses two sons in the war, one at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and another at the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1864, and another son loses an arm. His outspoken support of the Confederacy causes him to be jailed for a time at Fort Monroe, where one of his fellow prisoners is Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

In 1874, the British allow Mitchel to return to Ireland and in 1875 he is elected in a by-election to be a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom representing the Tipperary constituency. However, his election is invalidated on the grounds that he is a convicted felon. He contests the seat again in the resulting by-election and is again elected, this time with an increased vote.

Unfortunately, Mitchel, one of the staunchest enemies to English rule of Ireland in history, dies eight days later in Newry on March 20, 1875, and is buried there. Thirty-eight years later, his grandson, John Purroy Mitchel, is elected Mayor of New York City.


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Death of T. P. Gill, Member of the Irish Parliamentary Party

Thomas Patrick (T. P.) Gill, a prominent member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in the late 19th and early 20th century, dies on January 19, 1931. He is a Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons representing the South Louth constituency unopposed from 1885 to 1892. His uncle Peter is an unsuccessful election candidate in 1868 in County Tipperary.

Gill is born on October 25, 1858, in Ballygraigue, Nenagh, County Tipperary, the first of four sons of Robert Gill, a civil engineer who is assistant county surveyor, and Mary (née Clampett), daughter of a woolen merchant, James Clampett of Mount Kennett, County Limerick. He attends St. Joseph’s CBS Nenagh, St. John’s College, Kilkenny, and Trinity College Dublin becoming a journalist, firstly as editor of the Catholic World magazine of New York, and an associate editor of the North American Review (1883–85). He marries Annie Fennell of Dublin in 1882 and they have two sons, Donat and Roy, and a daughter Finola.

Gill is a friend and political ally of Charles Stewart Parnell. After the death of Parnell, he remains with the Irish Parliamentary Party. He works with Horace Plunkett in developing the Irish co-operative movement. He is member and honorary secretary to the 1895 Recess Committee which leads to the formation of both the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI), forerunner of the Irish Department of Agriculture, and the Vocational Education Committee (VEC). His key work for the Recess Committee is research into the state aid to agriculture in France and Denmark. In February 1900, he is appointed Secretary of the new Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction in Ireland. In 1907, he is appointed Chairman of the Departmental Committee on Irish Forestry. He also serves on a number of governmental committees concerning agriculture and agricultural production. He is President of the Irish Technical Instruction Association from 1925 to 1929.

A raconteur with, in the words of R. A. Anderson, ‘a queer charm about him,’ Gill moves in Dublin literary circles, and in his retirement, he makes a translation of Louis Paul-Dubois’ Le drame irlandais et l’Irlande nouvelle (1927), published posthumously as The Irish struggle and its results (1934).

Gill is an uncle of former Workers’ Party of Ireland president and Dublin West TD Tomás Mac Giolla.

Gill dies in a Dublin hospital on January 19, 1931. His papers are in the National Library of Ireland.

(Pictured: “Portrait of T.P. Gill, Journalist, Secretary, Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction,” oil on canvas by Sarah Purser, 1898, National Gallery of Ireland)


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Death of Civil War Photographer Mathew Benjamin Brady

Mathew Benjamin Brady, one of the earliest photographers in American history and best known for his scenes of the American Civil War, dies in New York City on January 15, 1896.

Brady leaves little record of his life before photography. Speaking to the press in the last years of his life, he states that he was born between 1822 and 1824 in Warren County, New York, near Lake George. He is the youngest of three children to Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Samantha Julia Brady. In official documents before and during the war, however, he claims to have been born in Ireland.

At age 16, Brady moves to Saratoga, New York, where he meets portrait painter William Page and becomes Page’s student. In 1839, the two travel to Albany, New York, and then to New York City, where he continues to study painting with Page, and also with Page’s former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France in 1839 and returned to the United States to enthusiastically push the new daguerreotype invention of capturing images. At first, Brady’s involvement was limited to manufacturing leather cases that hold daguerreotypes. But soon he becomes the center of the New York artistic colony that wishes to study photography. Morse opens a studio and offers classes. Brady is one of the first students.

In 1844, Brady opens his own photography studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in New York, and by 1845, he begins to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans, including the likes of Senator Daniel Webster and poet Edgar Allan Poe. In 1849, he opens a studio at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., where he meets Juliet Handy, whom he marries in 1850 and lives with on Staten Island. His early images are daguerreotypes, and he wins many awards for his work. In the 1850s ambrotype photography becomes popular, which gives way to the albumen print, a paper photograph produced from large glass negatives most commonly used in American Civil War photography.

In 1850, Brady produces The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures. The album, which features noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, is not financially rewarding but invites increased attention to his work and artistry. In 1854, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularizes the carte de visite and these small pictures rapidly become a popular novelty, with thousands being created and sold in the United States and Europe.

At first, the effect of the American Civil War on Brady’s business is a brisk increase in sales of cartes de visite to departing soldiers. He readily markets to parents the idea of capturing their young soldiers’ images before they might be lost to war by running an ad in The New York Daily Tribune. However, he is soon taken with the idea of documenting the war itself. He first applies to an old friend, General Winfield Scott, for permission to have his photographers travel to the battle sites, and eventually, he makes his application to President Abraham Lincoln himself. Lincoln grants permission in 1861, with the proviso that Brady finances the project himself.

His efforts to document the American Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio onto the battlefields earns Brady his place in history. His first popular photographs of the conflict are at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he gets so close to the action that he barely avoids capture. While most of the time the battle has ceased before pictures are taken, he comes under direct fire at the First Battle of Bull Run, Petersburg, and Fredericksburg.

Brady also employs Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C. Roche, and seventeen other men, each of whom is given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the American Civil War. He generally stays in Washington, D.C., organizing his assistants and rarely visiting battlefields personally.

This may be due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady’s eyesight has begun to deteriorate in the 1850s. Many of the images in Brady’s collection are, in reality, thought to be the work of his assistants. He is criticized for failing to document the work, though it is unclear whether it is intentional or due simply to a lack of inclination to document the photographer of a specific image. Because so much of his photography is missing information, it is difficult to know not only who took the picture, but also exactly when or where it was taken.

In October 1862 Brady opens an exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery, titled The Dead of Antietam. Many images in this presentation are graphic photographs of corpses, a presentation new to America. This is the first time that many Americans see the realities of war in photographs, as distinct from previous “artists’ impressions.”

Brady, through his many paid assistants, takes thousands of photos of American Civil War scenes. Much of the popular understanding of the Civil War comes from these photos. There are thousands of photos in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress taken by him and his associates. The photographs include Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and soldiers in camps and battlefields. The images provide a pictorial cross reference of American Civil War history. He is not able to photograph actual battle scenes, as the photographic equipment in the day is still in the infancy of its technical development and requires that a subject be still for a clear photo to be produced.

Following the conflict, a war-weary public loses interest in seeing photos of the war, and Brady’s popularity and practice decline drastically.

During the war, Brady spends over $100,000 (equivalent to $1,691,000 in 2020) to create over 10,000 plates. He expects the U.S. government to buy the photographs when the war ends. When the government refuses to do so he is forced to sell his New York City studio and go into bankruptcy. The United States Congress grants Brady $25,000 in 1875, but he remains deeply in debt. The public was unwilling to dwell on the gruesomeness of the war after it has ended, and so private collectors are scarce.

Depressed by his financial situation and loss of eyesight and devastated by the death of his wife in 1887, Brady dies penniless in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 15, 1896, from complications following a streetcar accident. His funeral is financed by veterans of the 7th New York Infantry Regiment. He is buried in the Congressional Cemetery, which is located in Barney Circle, a neighborhood in the Southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C.

Brady photographs 18 of the 19 American presidents from John Quincy Adams to William McKinley. The exception is the 9th President, William Henry Harrison, who dies in office three years before Brady starts his photographic collection. He photographs Abraham Lincoln on many occasions. His Lincoln photographs have been used for the $5 bill and the Lincoln penny. One of his Lincoln photos is used by the National Bank Note Company as a model for the engraving on the 90c Lincoln Postage issue of 1869.

(Pictured: “Mathew B. Brady,” oil on canvas by Charles Loring Elliott, 1857, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)


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Death of F. R. Higgins, Poet & Theatre Director

Frederick Robert Higgins, Irish poet and theatre director, dies of a heart attack on January 6, 1941.

Higgins is born on April 24, 1896, on the west coast of Ireland in Foxford, County Mayo. He is the eldest son of Joseph, a policeman stationed in Foxford at the time of his son’s birth, and Annie Higgins. His poem “Father and Son” is a loving tribute to his father. He grows up in Ballivor, County Meath, where his family has farmed for several generations. He spends the largest part of his adult life in Dublin, in a house he has built beside the River Dodder in Rathfarnham. His health is poor, and though his friends are inclined to regard him as a hypochondriac, his frequent predictions that he would die young prove to be accurate.

Higgins marries Beatrice May Moore in 1921. The marriage is a happy one. Even Frank O’Connor, who dislikes him, praises him as a kind and considerate husband. He is however reputed to have had a number of affairs, notably with the actress Ria Mooney.

Higgins is a student of William Butler Yeats and serves on the board of the Abbey Theatre from 1935 until his death. His best-known book of poetry is The Gap of Brightness (1940). He is also well known for his poem “Father and Son.” He writes a moving elegy for his fellow poet Pádraic Ó Conaire. He is generally acknowledged to be a fine poet but is less successful in his Abbey Theatre work. Frank O’Connor says unkindly that Higgins could not direct a children’s poetry recitation.

In 1937 Higgins is tour manager of the Abbey Theatre production of Teresa Deevy‘s Katie Roche, which tours to the Ambassador Theatre in New York City. There are five performances from October 2-6. His Abbey career can be seen in the Abbey Theatre archives.

Higgins is a popular and convivial man. Even O’Connor, who comes to regard him with deep suspicion, admits that he is a delightful person to know. His circle of friends includes many of the leading Irish literary figures of his time, including Yeats, Padraic O Conaire, George William Russell, Lennox Robinson, and for a time O’Connor. O’Connor, however, comes to regard him as untrustworthy and a troublemaker, and describes him unflatteringly in his memoir My Father’s Son. For Yeats, Higgins seems to feel a genuine affection, once remarking that he never left Yeats’ house without “feeling like a thousand dollars.” He is also capable of great kindness and generosity to younger writers like Patrick Kavanagh.

(Pictured: “F. R. Higgins,” Oil on Canvas by Sean O’Sullivan, courtesy of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin)